Wednesday, December 31, 2014

2014 - The Highlights (Tetris_King)

As the New Year approaches, this is the
perfect opportunity to look back on the ups and downs of the year. Below I have
listed my favorites and disappointments of 2014 that was covered by this blog,
with links provided where appropriate, with no specific order intended.

I don’t actually feel an obligation to
include Transformers movies on my lists, but I really did enjoy this
installment in the Live-Action Movie continuity. Yes, I’ll agree that it does
seem to run a bit long, but what I liked were the improvements it made over
previous films, mainly in regards to the human cast and how well it draws from
the Transformers mythos (including the G1 cartoon continuity, Transformers
Animated, and the IDW G1 continuity among others) to add to the experience.
After having seen it multiple times, I find this installment to be the best so
far in the live-action movies, as well as a worthy representative of 30 years
of Transformers, and I can’t wait to see what happens in the next one.

During the gap between Captain America:
The Winter Soldier and The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Marvel Studios decided to
base a movie on Guardians of the Galaxy, one of Marvel’s more obscure comic
lines to the point where even a die-hard fan might have to fact-check some
things. Though I was skeptical at first, I was interested partially because
James Gunn (writer of Lollipop Chainsaw) was the director and the end result
turned out much better than I anticipated. Even though this movie introduces an
entire team, I thought it managed to do that pretty well (I actually ended up a
fan of both Groot and Rocket Raccoon) and the music choice was surprisingly
good and created a unique atmosphere, to the point where I will probably
forever associate those songs with this movie. To me, this was a surprising hit
from Marvel Studios and I highly anticipate what they decide to do next with
the characters.

Even though I have only recently gotten
into JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (I’m currently waiting for the anime of Part III:
Stardust Crusaders to continue), this is a fighting game that I found myself
having a hard time putting down. Not only is the fanservice amazing (the
developers really did their research and it shows), it’s also a game I found to
be fairly well-balanced, with each character offering a unique move set that
matches their canon abilities and actions, some of which can actually be
influenced by which character the opponent is using and, sometimes, even the
chosen arena, just to name a couple of factors. If the anime grabbed my interest
in the series, this game really helped to cement it.

Just as Age of Extinction ties into the
30th anniversary of Transformers, Tetris Ultimate is a new game made
to correlate with the 30th anniversary of Tetris, and I couldn’t
have asked for anything better. While retaining what makes Tetris what it is,
this game provides a huge swath of gameplay options to keep you interested for
what may be a very long time. Top that off with great music and visuals and you
have yourself a worthy Tetris game for the modern age.

While I wasn’t really enthralled by the
first The Amazing Spider-Man, I went to see this movie anyway solely so I could
stay somewhat in the loop regarding comic book superhero movies. Unfortunately,
despite the fact that I wasn’t expecting much anyway, I ended up getting less
than that, since the plot manages to be somewhat incoherent and the characters
unlikeable, resulting in a complete mess of a movie (not even a costume change
was enough to convince me that it was for the better). In the end, I found this
installment to be a very lackluster example of a Spider-Man flick and I hope something about it improves in the next
release, if there even is one.

I may be a fan of My Little Pony G4
(though not necessarily very high on the “brony” scale), but I’m not really
much of a fan of the Equestria Girls spin-off. However, when this movie was announced,
I decided to watch it anyway to see what direction the series would be taken in,
plus the previews made it seem like there was some promise to it. This turned
out to be more of an empty promise, since the re-introduction of Twilight
Sparkle from the pony world into the human world ruined any potential this
movie may have had with fleshing out Sunset Shimmer as a character, though the
music is somewhat better and the villains were better written than Sunset
Shimmer. To me though, this movie only presents a rather marginal improvement
over the last feature and I really hope that Twilight Sparkle isn’t shoehorned
into the plot again so that the spin-off can have its own identity, despite
whatever potential for this hope not coming to pass the post-credits scene
might present.

Transformers: Rise of the Dark SparkWhen I heard about the concept behind
this game, that it was a crossover between the Movie and Aligned Transformers
continuities, I was curious to see how well it would be pulled off, though I
expected that it would not be able to top Fall of Cybertron. Not only did it
meet this expectation, it also turned out to be worse than I thought it would
be. The game does manage to somewhat fit itself into the Aligned continuity
portions, which is more than I can say for the Age of Extinction half, but on
top of this it isn’t that much fun, rather it feels like the game is just going
through the motions. This also seems to carry over into the voice acting, since
while it uses the same cast from Fall of Cybertron, save for a select few
(Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime not withstanding), it sounded like the actors weren’t
putting in their best effort. In short, this game felt like it had some really
wasted potential with its premise and I hope more of an effort is put into any
future Transformers games.